At Least 235
Die in Uganda Cult Suicide

By Gavin Pattison

MBARARA - (Reuters)
- At least 235 members of a millennium cult, including dozens of children,
are believed to have died by mass suicide in a blazing church in southwestern
Uganda.

Expecting the end
of the world, followers of the obscure ''Movement for the Restoration
of the Ten Commandments of God" locked themselves in the church in
the small town of Kanungu at breakfast time on Friday, police said on
Saturday.

After several hours
of chanting and singing, they set the church on fire, taking their own
lives in the world's second biggest mass suicide of recent times.

Police spokesman
Assuman Mugenyi, who visited the scene 320 km (200 miles) southwest of
the capital Kampala, said all 235 registered members of the sect had probably
perished in the fire and unregistered new arrivals may also have died.

He said police were
having difficulty counting bodies burned beyond recognition.

``There were about
235 registered (cult members) but there are likely to be more killed in
the fire -- ladies, children and men," Mugenyi said.

Led By Excommunicated
Priests And Nuns

Cult leaders, who
included three excommunicated priests and two excommunicated nuns, taught
that the world would end in the year 2000. Their followers dressed in
a uniform of white, green and black robes.

``Prior to this incident
their leader told believers to sell off their possessions and prepare
to go to Heaven," Mugenyi said, adding that the police were treating
the incident as both suicide and murder because children were involved.

``Definitely it is
both because there were a big number of children who were led there by
their parents," he said.

He said the wooden-framed
windows of the church appeared to have been boarded up and there was no
sign of a struggle. The bodies -- burned beyond recognition -- lay in
the center of the shell of the building.

``People said they
heard some screaming but it was all over very quickly," he said,
adding that locals had also heard an explosion.

He said the corpses
had been left where they lay for forensic experts to examine on Sunday.

The church is 40
km (25 miles) north of Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in
the 1994 genocide, and 15 km (10 miles) from the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, where armies of six African states have been sucked into a
messy civil war.

Byword For Horrors

A former British
colony once called the Pearl of Africa for its fertile soil and plentiful
rains, Uganda became a byword for African horrors during the 1971-79 dictatorship
of Idi Amin, whose regime killed up to 500,000 opponents and expelled
70,000 people of Asian origin.

More bloodshed followed
Amin's downfall, until guerrilla leader Yoweri Museveni won power in 1986,
restoring relative peace.

But an extreme and
violent Christian cult, the Holy Spirit Movement, sprang up among northern
ethnic groups in the late 1980s. Many hundreds of believers died in suicidal
attacks, convinced that magic oil would protect them from the bullets
of Museveni's troops.

Its successor, the
Lord's Resistance Army, is still pursuing a guerrilla war, kidnapping
large numbers of boys and girls to serve as soldiers and sex slaves and
dodging back and forth across the border with southern Sudan, which has
a long running civil war of its own.

Since last year,
the police have asked all religious sects or cults to register their members
locally. In September, police in central Uganda disbanded another Doomsday
cult, the 1,000-member ``World Message Last Warning" sect.

The cult's leaders
were charged with rape, kidnapping and illegal confinement.

The largest mass
suicide of recent times took place in 1978 when a paranoid U.S. pastor,
the Reverend Jim Jones, led 914 followers to their deaths at Jonestown,
Guyana, by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink.

Cult members who
refused to swallow the liquid were shot. Jones had carved a sign over
his altar at Jonestown, reading ''Those who forget the past are doomed
to repeat it."

In recent years there
have been several smaller group suicides in Europe and North America,
three of them involving the Solar Temple, an international sect that believes
death by ritual suicide leads to rebirth.